minor successes

When I was a senior in college, a chest-high patch of Nandina ("Heavenly Bamboo") grew in the quad just outside my dorm.  I loved its leaves, precisely-shaped and evergreen, its crimson berries that clustered like grapes, its flowers that blushed just before my graduation that May.  When I came home, I was obsessed with nandina.  The plant nursery where I worked stocked the dwarf variety, and at the end of the summer I planted seven bushes at my parents' house.  To walk around their house now is to see a list of my early mistakes - the plum tree planted plum in front of a window, the awkwardly-placed rose bed, the choice of leyland cypress (really?!) as a privacy hedge - and the serendipitous successes - lilac "Miss Kim," my wonderful Persian Ironwood, the hydrangea border tinted pink and blue.  The dwarf nandina was perhaps my best choice of all: it has required virtually no care, its winter red subtly picks up the brick behind it, and it's naturally compact (a great quality in a plant, if you ask me).  It is now just beginning to flush.  There is no season when I don't appreciate this workhorse - in the bleak northeastern winter, when it burns a passionate red, and in the spring, when it quenches the fire and turns a fresh green - but it's wonderful in the in-between times, too.